From: "The Sultan of Brunei"
To: "snurz"
Subject: Fw: Nickelsdorf report -- 1st evening
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 1999 20:55:32 +0200
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Priority: 3


-----Original Message-----
From: The Sultan of Brunei
To: thewire@onelist.com
Date: Saturday, July 17, 1999 8:53 PM
Subject: Nickelsdorf report -- 1st evening



konfrontationen '99 ^÷ 20th international festival for jazz & improved music Nickelsdorf, Austria

On the bus on the way to the Vienna train station there were both a nun and a hunchback; the combination is traditionally considered to be a good-luck omen in Mitteleuropa.

Festival organizer Hans Falb doesn't need to fall back on the "beyond borders" spiel that characterizes so many European festivals, since he's sitting on one. The guarded border less than two clicks down the road keeps the agricultural flatland from drifting onto the rest of the Great Magyar Plain. Nevertheless, in the past few years the program has indeed shifted so as to incorporate not just free-jazz improv, but improvised electronic musics.

Pat Thomas Steve Noble duo (piano, synth, electronics, turntables): Flapping & squeals, carousel samples, marching bands, old radio broadcasts gone astray, piano ranging from Tilbury to sub-Gayle. If you regret the fact that the world has onlyone Christian Marclay, this set was for you.

Tedium factor (min. 0, max of 5): 4.
Drug of choice: ibuprofin as needed.

Jim O'Rourke meets Christian Fennesz meets Alan Licht (2 Powerbooks and guitar, respectively): Caution: saccharine has been known to cause cancer in laboratory animals. First set, the ever-ubiquitous J.O'R. with Licht: air thick with drones, occasionally drenched in sunshine. Tedium factor: 2. J.O'R. with local favourite Fennesz (dubbed "Electronic Mastermind" by Vienna's alternative weekly): jazz double-bass samples given the full Fennesz treatment: compelling. Amid the crackling, something that once may have been a horn line. Telegraph rhythms buzzing back and forth. Tedium factor: 1. All three together: half-remembered soundtracks sometimes encountered (why with this music is it somehow enough to bring in some tinkling now & then? and how would one bring in rhythms?) Piano samples, plucked & in octaves, then they all close down nicely.

Final tedium factor: 1.5
Drug of choice: hash (but eaten, not smoked); lacking that, an excessive dose of Nyquil.

Henneman String Quartet: alternates mercurially between the playful and the severe. Did you think that just because it was strings it was all going to be lyrical? Music is still work, you know.

Tedium factor: 3.
Drug of choice: nitrous.

John Butcher Quartet (with John Edwards, Rhodri Davies, Martin Blume): another saxophonist who plays perpendicular to the rest of the tradition (to add to Mats Gustafsson here on Sunday night). Butcher is to Evan Parker as Herbie Nichols is to Bud Powell. Prepared harp, no quarter! Large swatches of tension broken by slamming things. Formerly jazz chops ondisplay.

Tedium factor: 1.
Drug of choice: large quantities of ouzo.

Farmers Manual: by now it's 2 a.m. Half the audience has remained of a crowd of about 250; in the next two and a half hours this will gradually dwindle down to ten people. On the left side of stage, a screen with a projected text ("I never used it."); at right, a long table holding a bank of laptops and terminals. After many minutes of a Throbbing Gristle-type throb, the quartet of ostensible computer jocks (three in various black T-shirts, one in grey) finally files onstage. Visuals evolve into heavily Russian Futurist and Constructivist motifs, numerals (recall Charles Demuth's "I Saw the Number Five in Gold"), maybe buildings, maybe railroad cars. A Conet Project for the eyes, an eerie, unsettling hyper-technological vibe for the ears, on the level of the Hafler Trio's best. In attempting to determine whether the rhythms of the visuals are coinciding with the rhythms of the cracklings and the shifting drone patterns, the mind is lured along some previously uncharted perceptual interface. The audience begin to behave strangely: people get up to leave, a couple of them trip in otherwise adequately lighted areas; bottles clink; someone drops a glass; some begin to eat compulsively or fidget; a drunk starts hollering. In the next 20 minutes, at least ten members of the audience will fall asleep. Words on the screen constantly morph into new ones, then the visuals return to images which include (1) strips of film, or are they really insect chromosomes; (2) a highly treated human face, maybe casually taken from a hidden-camera site, morphing slo-mo into a mask of agony, like Munch's famous angst-face as the impact of the nuclear blast hits; (3) motifs seemingly from the band's "Explorers_We" web page (fm_exp); (4) colourful Czech industrial/commercial typography from the 1920s, like from a matchbox or carton of detergent, going by too quickly for the mind to retain; and (5) the German phrases "don't smoke poisonous tobacco ... don't drink poisonous alcohol". When red and black dominate the screen, they don't seem threatening (cf. Kraftwerk's "Man-Machine"), but when purple "gothic" colors appear, the audience usually reacts badly one way or another. A slow but steady stream of departures accompany the industrial noise and fleeting orange visuals which shift back to black-and-white. Occasional audience heckling: the Bespectacled Geekish Member (with a really sharp 11-o'clock-shadow goatee!) either heckles back, or flashes sign of victory (cf. Churchill, Walesa, et al.). The Autistic-Looking Member often lights up cigarettes -- according to one rumour, this usually means that a new subroutine or software or maybe entire operating system that he's been perfecting is working, so he can relax (he's been known to devise new patches even while the group is performing). The Tall Kind-of-Goofy-Looking Member occasionally slips offstage to confirm that the video projections are working properly. The music settles down into a loop: the members file out: no applause. Loop continues, but with an occasional glitch where it's interrupted and replaced by a different one, then back to the first. Punters continue to file out, oblivious to the fact that the interruptions that redirect the program to a different loop are becoming more frequent (the band is probably utilizing a weighted random operation here). When the loop glitches reach a critical point, the music suddenly changes. Members return to stage. After their return, the visuals often tear down the fourth wall, displaying one of the computer screens, and the various pointing-and-clicking is visible for all to see. There are hints that a live feed or stream is somehow involved. The music now sounds as thought it began as samples -- but from what? This is jazz improvisation as reconstructed by some future civilization, keeping the spontaneity and fun, but sound-wise reminiscent of David Tudor, Merzbow, even zoviet*france. Always instantaneous variety. After another hour, as pre-dawn deep blue skylight comes through the unroofed portions of the courtyard, the music world's answer to a hacker convention quietly adjourns.

Tedium factor: "Query undefined -- check your settings."
Drug of choice: black Afghan hash, Hawaiian mushrooms, Isostar

-- Alex Scheibus